What is Marketing Automation? Here's everything you need to know.
Marketing Automation, what is it? On this page, we have compiled everything you need to know to get started with Marketing Automation. There is a lot of talk about “Marketing Automation tools”, but what does such a tool or system really do? We explain what the term “Marketing Automation” means, why it benefits your company and how Rules software can help you automate communication throughout the customer journey. Let’s go, what is Marketing Automation?
"Marketing Automation - a system for automation"
Marketing Automation is a pre-programmed process that allows companies to automate their marketing communications and automatically deliver personalized marketing, at every point of contact with the customer. Marketing Automation helps with:
- to generate new leads
- convert leads
- create strong and loyal customer relationships
There are many benefits to automating your digital marketing and instead very few disadvantages of automation. By replacing manual processes with automated ones, you save time, increase efficiency and take advantage of the opportunities that Marketing Automation opens up. It can be about everything from e-mail marketing and lead nurturing to a more personalized experience for your e-commerce.
What does automation mean?
Automation works exactly as the name says, something happens automatically. You simply let a machine or a technique do a job. Automation replaces manual processes by letting technology handle the work. You can set up an automation with a Marketing Automation tool like Rules. For example, you can send automated messages via:
- SMS
- Email marketing
- Landing pages
- Social media
We offer a tool for Marketing Automation in Swedish and English for all companies, regardless of digital maturity. In order for customers to be able to maximize results, we also provide sales support in the form of free CSM meetings, where we answer questions about CRM and provide support in how to increase sales in the long and short term.
Valuable customer data
When you integrate your Marketing Automation platform with the other systems and platforms that contains valuable customer data, you can target your marketing to customers based on:
- activity
- purchase history
- behavior on your site
- preferences
Based on that, you can tailor your digital communication and marketing and deliver it to the customer at the right time, through the right channel. In other words, it’s about identifying your customers, capturing interest and then retaining them, while increasing your company’s revenue. Whether you are an e-trader or have some other type of website.
How does Marketing Automation work?
Marketing Automation can be used in extremely many different ways. However, many people fail to exploit the full potential of an MA tool, partly due to ignorance but also because there are so many possibilities. But how does Marketing Automation really work in practice and what can be achieved with the help of automation? We explain this below.
Lead nurturing - nurture your customer relationships
Once potential customers and visitors have given away customer data, companies can use Marketing Automation to start building a relationship with the customer, using automated welcome communication. When a potential customer, a lead becomes a customer, the technology allows companies to automatically nurture the relationship through relevant communication. It also allows you to “win back” customers that the company is about to lose. This makes your interactions with the customer both richer and more profitable, good huh!? Lead nurturing is about communicating with our leads with relevant content throughout the entire buying process, from first contact with them to completed purchase.
Collects customers digital footprints
Marketing Automation is based on information and works as a collection system that stores customers behavior and activity on the web. Every time a customer, for example, starts subscribing to a newsletter and leaves its e-mail, buys something from a store or clicks on an ad, they give away valuable information in the form of digital footprints. The more a visitor stays on the website, the more information it leaves behind. What Marketing Automation does then, is to collect all the data and store it. Based on that information, the system can then send out automatic trigger emails to customers who have registered their e-mail at some point.
Find out what your customers are looking for
The goal is therefore that visitors in some way should share information about themselves such as name, e-mail, workplace and other relevant information when they visit a website. The more personal and specific information that the tool intercepts and collects about a customer, the more complete profile can be built about the customer. Marketing Automation also helps you to find out what your customers and visitors are looking for in services on your website or e-commerce, how they found it and how you then maintain a good relationship and communication. E-merchants therefore have a very big use of a Marketing Automation tool and all its functions.
Why is Marketing Automation important?
With the help of Marketing Automation, you can in a both time and cost-effective way, send personal, automated messages to a large number of contacts instead of just one at a time. This means that it enables ONE marketer to perform as well as an entire team. How effective isn’t that? Marketing Automation gives you the opportunity for you as a company to work more productively with marketing and sales, increase revenue faster and focus on other parts of the sales process.
Create long-lasting and loyal customer relationships
An MA system not only helps you save time and resources, even if that’s an extreme relief in itself. It also gives your customers a personalized customer experience with thoughtful, authentic communication that sounds personal and genuine, even though you are sending the same type of message to thousands of customers. With Rules’ technology for online Marketing Automation, you have the opportunity to build long-term and loyal customer relationships.
Build trust with the help of customized communication
Marketing Automation works great as a tool to create loyalty and trust with. The more you tailor your communication, the more your customers will trust that you will continue to deliver high quality products and / or services. You can also use automation in other ways and show loyalty to your customers by, for example, sending offers and discounts to people or leads who have previously integrated with the brand.
Create automated loops with Rules Marketing Automation platform
It’s important to remember that each customer is unique, which means that their customer journey with your brand should be so as well. Through Rule, you can build a digital Marketing Automation flow with a series of relevant emails that are automated and also adapted to the different phases that the customer is in, during the customer journey.
A forgotten shopping cart can be easily captured with an automated reminder. By setting up automatic cart abandonment reminders, you can effectively increase your sales. A tip is to include pictures of the products that remain in the shopping cart and have a clear call-to-action link back.
Many e-retailers offer their visitors the opportunity to monitor goods, if a product is out of stock. Through our developed Back in stock function, a back in stock email is automatically sent to the customer when the desired item is back in stock.
One of the best tools in digital marketing is Automail. These are emails that are triggered on the customer’s behavior or activity and are sent out automatically. The automation function of the Marketing Automation tool reduces manual work and ensures that you are always one step ahead.
Just because a customer has not traded or shown interest in your business for a while, does not mean that the customer is lost. You just need to give the customer a reason to come back and with the help of win back emails, you can do just that.
Transaction emails have 8x as much opening rate compared to traditional emails, which is worth taking advantage of. Include a discount along with an email after a completed purchase, where the customer is encouraged to provide valuable feedback. Or offer a discount check if the customer invites a friend to test a service/product.
Based on customer data in the form of website visits and order history, you can by using Rules Marketing Automation tool, easily create personalized emails consisting of targeted special offers or product recommendations. This type of email is often used in loyalty programs. It builds customer loyalty, keeps the customer’s interest alive and increases the chances of repurchases.
Engage and activate potential customers with onboarding emails
Activate and arouse curiosity in your customers with onboarding communication. It can be in the form of an inviting welcome message, where you can also include a welcome offer to increase the chances of buying and at the same time convert the customer to the website.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation gives you the opportunity to direct personalized communication towards your customers and in that way build loyalty. With the help of targeted and customized messages, the customer will feel noticed and your company will appear engaging and reliable. There is also a good chance that a customer who has got a good impression of a company will also return to it.
As a company, you can easily get an insight into the entire lead process, which means that we can review the customers behavior all the way from the channel it converts from, until it closes a deal. In this way, you can draw conclusions about which channels work best, which content appeals and interests the customer the most and which campaign to optimize.
Figures show that Marketing Automation has a very high ROI in e-mail marketing in particular. It opens up to strengthen and simplify many different steps in the sales process that generate both higher and faster ROI than marketing that is not automated. Different companies achieve different levels of ROI from Marketing Automation due to different levels of maturity in their processes, systems and skills. In other words, it’s about how they use the software – and where they are in their assumption.
In general, results show that:
- Companies that use Marketing Automation get better control of the sales funnel, have more productive sales-people and experience better revenues.
- Companies that use Marketing Automation are more likely to report faster growth, than users who don’t automate their marketing.
- The majority of companies see ROI in less than a year.
In both a time and cost-effective way, you can streamline and facilitate your digital marketing and communication. Marketing Automation makes it possible to send targeted messages to a larger number of contacts, instead of just one at a time. In this way, the manual work is reduced and instead space is created to optimize the digital strategy.
If you are a small business, it can be extremely costly to hire full-time marketers. In these cases, Marketing Automation is a perfect tool for achieving marketing goals without having to put too much resources into it. With smart Marketing Automation for your e commerce store, you can both save time and money.
Marketing Automation gives you the opportunity to get a much more complete and detailed picture of potential customers behavior than what manual methods can provide. By tracking customers interactions with the communication and marketing you target them, your team can gain a better understanding of which steps and tactics worked best during the customer journey. The learning of those insights can then be applied to future activities.
Want to get started with Marketing Automation in Rule? Explore Rule for free for 30 days
Marketing Automation throughout the customer journey
To attract them, it can be good to build a strategy where the focus is on capturing leads through, for example, a free trial offer, downloads and email marketing that can turn these visitors into customers. The idea is to get the consumer necessarily interested in sharing information, especially their email address. It’s by gathering important information about the potential customer that you will be able to build on and create a relationship, which is a crucial moment in the customer journey.
Based on data that shows what is appreciated by the customer's target group, personalized emails can be created with unique offers. It keeps the customer's interest alive and the chance that it makes a repurchase is great. At most e-retailers, you can monitor an item that is out of stock. If you have pre-programmed a back in stock function, an automatic back in stock mail will be sent to the customer when the product is back in stock. The customer then has a chance to buy the product and you get a chance to increase the conversion rate and increase sales. Win, win!
If, on the other hand, you have directed communication at a specific customer for a longer period of time to try to win it back but without progress, then it’s important to find out the reason behind the customer’s interruption. Then you can send a questionnaire email with an attached link that leads to a quick survey. In this way, you can get valuable feedback from your customers and at the same time show that you are committed to understanding the customer’s behavior.
Keys in Marketing Automation
Start by setting goals
It can be a good idea to start by first setting concrete goals for what you want to achieve with your marketing. By setting goals and milestones, you can constantly measure your success during the process. It also prevents you from missing important crucial moments. Once you have set clear goals, you can then implement MA in your marketing strategy as a tool to achieve the goals, see Marketing Automation as a useful tool. In this way, you can streamline your strategies and at the same time measure your progress.
Identify repetitive tasks
Before you choose to start working with Marketing Automation, it’s good to identify the most repetitive marketing activities that your company has. When that is done, you can start adapt automations to your marketing strategy. Examples of typical tasks that many marketing departments do manually, but that can be automated:
- Creating campaigns
- Newsletter
- Training / seminar invitations
- Updating contacts in CRM / Sales support
- Segment target groups
- Reply / confirmation email
- Customer lists for sellers
- Import and export of contacts between different systems and channels
Segment your audience
Marketing Automation is most effective when it is as targeted as possible. How you target your customers is determined by your customer base, your customers history and engagement. If you don’t get to know your recipients, there’s a risk that the message you sent out through your Marketing Automation system, will be sent incorrectly. This mistake can create irritation towards the company and customers, which in turn becomes negative for the brand. So, for successful automation, segmentation is A and O, so take your time.
Stay human!
Although Marketing Automation is important and effective when creating large campaigns, it’s even more important that the people involved in it are met by a personalized and genuine communication. This is especially important as human contact is still needed to have a strong and loyal relationship with the customer. Consumers can directly see the difference between personal messages versus messages that are obviously sent to an entire recipient base. So keep in mind that with the help of the points above, especially segmentation and analysis of customer behaviors, you can reach your customer in a human way without being perceived as a robot.
Marketing Automation explanation - summary
1
Increase people’s awareness of the brand
2
Reach out to potential customers
3
Sell more to both existing and new customers
We usually say that basically Marketing Automation is about all companies’ pursuit of the three-stage rocket, as you can see above. Marketing Automation helps you in short to strengthen customer relationships, generate leads and increase revenue with the help of pre-programmed and targeted communication based on the customer’s digital footprint. If you look at Marketing Automation as a way of working and not an individual service, you understand the endless possibilities that Marketing Automation offers. We hope that we have now straightened out the concept of Marketing Automation and made the benefits clear to you, so you can start working with the tool as a Marketing Automation specialist.
With our Marketing Automation software and segmentation tools, you can segment your communications and reach specific customers with tailored messages, at exactly the right time, via the best channel. Explore our Marketing Automation platform for free for 30 days.
FAQs
In short, Marketing Automation is a tool that allows you to send the right message to the right person at the right time. An MA tool helps you automate activities such as email, SMS, events and management of existing and potential customers.
Marketing Automation means that you let technology do the work for you. A system and software are used to automate marketing activities and streamline processes.
Setting up an automation in Rule is very uncomplicated. You just need to follow a few simple steps:
- Create an email feed
- Set a trigger
- Enable email feed
Congratulations - you are now done with your first automation!
When you set up an automation in Rule, it will collect all data that is registered when the specific automation is triggered. That data is then stored in Rules system and you can easily see complete statistics such as conversions, opening rate and sales.
Marketing Automation is the most cost and time efficient tool in marketing. By automating manual processes, your company can instead spend time optimizing the sales process while the software handles conversion, leads and sales for you. And that means you can basically market and communicate while you sleep.
Marketing Automation is a tool that marketers use to plan, coordinate, and measure their marketing campaigns, both online and offline. It's often used in conjunction with lifecycle marketing to manage and nurture leads, for the purpose of converting leads into customers.
Rule offers a Marketing Automation tool with functions for e-retailers who want to be able to reach their customers with the right message, at the right time, during all steps in the customer journey. By setting up a flow of automails that is automatically triggered on the customer's behavior or activity, you can ensure that you don't miss any opportunity to market or communicate with the customer. This in turn will lead to increased sales, digital growth and trust.
With automated marketing, companies can target customers via automated messages such as email, text messages, landing pages and social media. Messages are sent out automatically using processes called workflows that are set up in a Marketing Automation system such as Rules. By automating your marketing, you increase your visibility and create a better understanding of your potential customers' journey with your brand.
